Mitsubishi Electric Develops New Multiplexing 5g Technology For Radio Transmission

In order to overcome the transmission interference problem associated with radio communication in crowded urban areas, Mitsubishi Electric has come up with a solution – a new multibeam multiplexing radio communication technology for base stations for future 5G mobile communication systems based on combining several active phased-array antennas with massive antenna elements (massive APAAs) added with a new precoding technology for parallel transmission of data streams by transmitters.

This newly-developed wideband communication technology is designed for future fifth-generation wideband communication which will enable high-speed communication in high-frequency bands. Rather than the normal speed of the current 4G systems, this new multibeam multiplexing technology will operate at transmission speeds of 20Gbps, which is 60 times faster than the speed of 4G mobile base stations relying on multi-input multi-output (MIMO) technology.

Further details on this will be announced at the forthcoming IEICE Technical Committee on Radio Communication Systems in Tokyo on March 2. With this new massive MIMO technology, hundreds of antenna can be used to compensate for propagation loss in high-frequency bands. It will also use hybrid solutions merging analog and digital processing to avoid massive power consumption and digital circuitry. This Mitsubishi technology is already in use for commercial satellites and other related systems.

Mitsubishi combined massive APAAs and precoding technology in transmission to enhance transmission quality and power and at the same time overcome propagation loss in high-frequency bands – compared to the 2-beam transmission currently used by 4G mobile base stations – as much as 16-beam transmissions can be deployed to attain about 20Gbps when required for higher data rates.

It is common knowledge that signals from base stations often interfere with multiple mobile terminals located close together in crowded environment, but the problem is that lowering the transmission power of interfering signals to minimize the interference also results in reduced transmission speeds.

And so Mitsubishi came up with the solution of using “new nonlinear multi-diagonalization precoding technology combining multi-diagonalization precoding, with inherent interference, and nonlinear operation, which removes interference through multi-diagonalization precoding.”